The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The resources available to a user online are ever expanding. More websites, blogs, self-publishing and the like increases the amount of information online exponentially. Facebook™ users create 45 million status updates each day and Twitter™ has about 5 million tweets. Even though blogs are on the decline since the advent of social media some 900,000 new blog articles are written every day. This is no small number in fact if those articles were taken alone it would be enough content to fill the pages of the New York Times' for 19 years. Source: OnlineEducation.net.
For example, when a user does an online search, such as using GOOGLE™, hundreds of links to articles of interest may be presented according to some formula or ranking. The user would then have to review the articles on every link for desired information. As the amount of online content increases, the number of useless or marginally useful articles increases so that the user wastes considerable time surfing the links only to find nothing of value is presented. Searched terms may be highlighted along with text, but many times this also is not helpful. Moreover, offensive or crude material may be highlighted that offends the user.
Current search engines also may provide summaries of articles to help users. These summaries, however, are from only one point of view, if any at all. The summaries find matching terms and highlights text around the term without taking into account context or other terms that are emphasized in the article. Finally, search engines may be tricked into highlighting links that have nothing to do with the desired search by adding superfluous terms and bogus tags only to rank high on a list. Companies may pay to have their articles rank high even without any regard for the actual content. All of these situations result in wasted time reviewing articles and content online that does little to help a user in finding information of interest. As a result, search engines may start to fail as effective tools to identify and review articles online.